Wu Linwei, Yang Yunfeng, Chen Si, Jason Shi Zhou, Zhao Mengxin, Zhu Zhenwei, Yang Sihang, Qu Yuanyuan, Ma Qiao, He Zhili, Zhou Jizhong, He Qiang
State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Institute for Environmental Genomics and Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA.
ISME J. 2017 Dec;11(12):2874-2878. doi: 10.1038/ismej.2017.135. Epub 2017 Aug 25.
The ecological concept of the r-K life history strategy is widely applied in macro-ecology to characterize functional traits of taxa. However, its adoption in microbial communities is limited, owing to the lack of a measureable, convenient functional trait for classification. In this study, we performed an experiment of stepwise organic amendments in triplicate anaerobic digesters. We found that high resource availability significantly favored microbial r-strategists such as Bacillus spp. Incremental resource availability heightened average rRNA operon copy number of microbial community, resulting in a strong, positive correlation (r>0.74, P<0.008). This study quantifies how resource availability manipulations influence microbial community composition and supports the idea that rRNA operon copy number is an ecologically meaningful trait which reflects resource availability.
r-K生活史策略的生态概念在宏观生态学中被广泛应用于描述分类单元的功能特征。然而，由于缺乏可测量、方便的功能特征用于分类，它在微生物群落中的应用受到限制。在本研究中，我们在三个重复的厌氧消化器中进行了逐步添加有机物质的实验。我们发现高资源可用性显著有利于微生物r策略者，如芽孢杆菌属。资源可用性的增加提高了微生物群落的平均rRNA操纵子拷贝数，导致了强正相关（r>0.74，P<0.008）。本研究量化了资源可用性操纵如何影响微生物群落组成，并支持rRNA操纵子拷贝数是反映资源可用性的具有生态意义的特征这一观点。
